Malls are the future, or so said shopping mall magnate William S. Taubman to an audience at the annual conference of the International Downtown Association in 2005. Once this downtown revitalization fad peters out, he maintained, people will return to the kinds of enclosed shopping centers his family is famous for developing.
A decade later, the numbers aren't quite bearing that out, though. With the recent closings of Northland Center and Summit Place Mall and the financial struggles of other large enclosed shopping centers like Eastland, metro Detroit's experience with obsolete malls mirrors what is happening across the country.
While suburban malls are not yet thing of the past and high end malls are doing well on the whole, many older malls in older areas are becoming "grayfields." And when these huge, outdated structures on dozens of acres have been abandoned by retailers and shoppers, communities are left to deal with the decline and loss of major anchors and tax base generators.
We Americans love our shopping. The U.S. has
way more retail square footage per capita than any other country: 23.1 square feet of shopping center space as of 2009, or a whopping 46.6 square feet per person of total retail space of all types, twice the United Kingdom's 23.0 square feet per capita rate.
But we
celebrate our malls at the same time we
walk away from them.
Shopping malls are proof of mass psychology: people go to them because people go to them. And as there's always another newer, shinier retail destination of a different type just a few miles farther away, people also stop going when people stop going.
The poster child of failed malls is perhaps the former Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois. John Landis filmed
a car chase for the "Blues Brothers" movie there shortly before the mall closed in 1981, just 15 years after it had opened. It stood vacant and vandalized until it was demolished in 2012.
Other malls across the country have suffered less ignominious fates, but have lost some standing as retail magnets. Wasilla, Alaska's Cottonwood Creek Mall was replaced by a Target store. Palm Beach Mall in West Palm Beach, FL was demolished for Palm Beach Outlets that opened last year.
Locally, some sputtering malls have revived and redefined themselves as well. The owners of Wonderland Mall in Livonia and Tel-Twelve in Southfield demolished their enclosed spaces and reconfigured them as
power centers. Livonia Mall's enclosure came down for a Walmart supercenter and a smattering of retail outbuildings. Warren's Universal Mall made similar changes when renovations and new theaters and anchor stores failed to reverse the mall's decline.
The challenge of redeveloping dying malls
A failing mall's potential for redevelopment can be hindered by its foundational documents. Financing agreements sometimes require a mall to maintain its configuration or the borrower risks losing financing. Many mall department store anchors own their properties and parking lots, and if they close they can effectively keep competitors from taking the space that even they did not want. They may also have a say in what other retailers can occupy smaller mall spaces, thus potentially hindering the filling of vacancies.
As a result, some failing malls have had to add non-retail uses to stay alive. Eastgate Mall in Chattanooga became Eastgate Town Center, incorporating significant office space, two satellite college campuses, a call center, and medical facilities to its much diminished retail mix. The former Bon Marche Mall in Baton Rouge is now Bon Carré Business Center, with call centers, offices, a tech start-up incubator, and some retail. Southtown Mall in Fort Wayne, Indiana, attracted Menards and Walmart stores in 2006 after being acquired and demolished by the city following its closure in 2003. The site is being studied for the feasibility other non-retail uses.
Failing malls in metro Detroit have also explored adding non-retail uses. Jefferson County (Illinois) Development Corporation executive director and former Southfield Downtown Development Authority director Jonathan Hallberg remembers discussing reopening all or part of Northland's mall enclosure and adding outlot condominiums and other non-retail uses to the complex.
But as bad as it may look for Northland or Summit Place today, don't write off those sites as retail nodes, says urban planner and retail consultant Robert Gibbs, principal of Gibbs Planning Group in Birmingham.
The core characteristics that made the sites attractive for retail uses still remain true: nearby dense housing, concentrated commercial uses, and easy transportation access.
Why malls die and how they can be reborn
The closing of malls is often due more to tastes and biases than market fundamentals -- real estate brokers have an interest in promoting newer retail sites, younger customers don't want to shop and hang out where mom and dad do, and even developers perceive that an underutilized mall implies that there is no retail market in the surrounding area.
On the contrary, inner ring suburbs often have stronger retail growth potential because there is less retail per capita than newer areas. And dense cities are particularly underserved. That national average of 23.1 square feet of shopping center space per capita falls slightly in inner ring suburbs and plummets to a meager three square feet of shopping center space in Detroit.
The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City pioneered the idea of dollar density in the 1990s. Using their model, let's say an outer suburban zip code has 10 households making an average $1000 a year. That's $10,000 of total income there. A central city zip code of 100 households making $100 a year yields the same $10,000 annually. The dollar density is the same in both locations, but 100 households in the central city area will need 100 refrigerators, TVs and other retail basics, compared to 10 suburban refrigerators, TVs, and so on.
Dollar density maps of metro Detroit show many city and inner suburban neighborhoods on a relatively even footing with wealthier suburbs. All the same, retail developers today often seem to believe that city dwellers should be able to get to suburban shopping centers to meet their needs, leaving the cities relatively empty of the same market opportunities. Some simply may not want to spend money on updates and upgrades to aging retail facilities, fearing the same lack of market and leaving their properties to languish.
As development pushes urban fringes farther out from the centers, demographics around older mall sites don't change as much as people perceive they do, according to Gibbs. It's more that people want new experiences in new settings. And the new hot retail model pulling away shoppers is the open air town center concept with streets, plazas, and other uses intermingled.
Open air, Main Street-like shopping centers with other uses adjacent or in the same complex are popping up everywhere. Many have reclaimed parking lot space for development. Where 30-40 acres of parking had previously been required for a typical 70-80 acre mall property in the past, current parking standards call for only 15-20 acres of pavement for vehicles. That frees up tons of land for apartments, public spaces, new in-line convenience shops and restaurants, and more.
Critics of such developments emphasize that they occur on private land and are thus subject to the owners' restrictions in terms of public expression of political beliefs, etc. You are free to wander the place as long as you're buying, eating, renting, or working there. Yet it cannot be denied that people like these places: the feel of a cleaner main street or downtown, the attraction of other people around them, and perhaps the nostalgia for central business districts that worked well and felt good. Downtown management agencies are learning from these "
lifestyle centers" and similar developments.
So even if a new, open air Northland develops on the old mall's site, the new one may harken back to its origins as an imitation main street shopping district, but it will need to meet today's needs for walkability, mixed uses, and some measure of a 24-hour urban feel. Something more like a
Santana Row—design-wise if not in terms of retail mix—than Westfield Valley Fair Mall, a typical shopping center across the street from it. It can work with the right combination of retailers lining comfortable sidewalks and plazas that connect with apartments, offices, and other uses not traditionally associated with shopping malls.
Underutilized malls in easily accessible, highly visible central locations can survive with new formats. They may not look like shopping malls as we know them today, but that may be good. Grayfields give us once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to replace the people-unfriendly, auto-centric developments we had built with projects more akin to the communities we love.
Michael Boettcher is a Detroit-based writer and urban planner.
All photos by David Lewinski Photography.